One of the things I love about leading our Next Level Leadership® group coaching program is hearing leaders’ stories about how they’re following through on their most important development opportunities. As I’ve written here before, when they’re mapping out how to follow through, I always encourage them to look for repeatable actions that are relatively easy to do and likely to make a difference. Taking that approach has the benefit of jump starting the leader’s momentum and creating a positive impact through their behaviors.

In one of our current group coaching cohorts, I have several participants who have landed on simple mantras that are changing their leadership for the better. Here are a couple of examples of what they’re saying and the difference it’s making for them and their organizations.

One super high capacity leader in the program learned through her opening 360 degree assessment that she could do a better job of listening and not dominating conversations. That’s an opportunity that a lot of really bright, “get a lot of stuff done” leaders have. Their brain and problem solving process run so fast that they have a tendency to roll over people...

If you’ve spent any time thinking about your retirement account or other investments, you’re probably familiar with the concept of asset diversification. The idea is to not over-invest in one particular company or class of investments but to balance your portfolio across different types of assets. As a simple example, it makes sense for many people to invest in both stocks and bonds since when one of the two is up the other is often down. You don’t get crazy high returns when you invest this way, but you usually avoid catastrophic losses. Over time, the balanced investment approach of asset diversification has proven to yield reasonably predictable rates of return. Not super sexy rates of return, but rates in which you can have some degree of confidence.

And, by now, you may be asking yourself, “I thought this was a leadership blog. What’s up with the investment strategy tutorial?” There’s a connection and it comes from a client I’m working with in one of our leadership development programs. On a recent group follow-up call, she and her colleagues were sharing what they’d been working on since our last in-person session on building...

I took the picture that accompanies this post from atop a trash can at the corner of Ocean Avenue and Montana Avenue in Santa Monica on Saturday. Thousands of people rallied there at the end of one of 800 March for Our Lives events that were held around the world that day for students, their families and friends to speak out against gun violence. As you’re no doubt aware, the largest of the marches took place in Washington, where the student leaders from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida spoke to a crowd of hundreds of thousands of people.

It was only six weeks ago that 17 students were killed in a mass shooting at Stoneman Douglas High. This past weekend a million or more people marched around the world in support of the Parkland students’ movement that is encapsulated with the hashtag NeverAgain. Like many of you, I’ve marveled at and been inspired by the initiative of a group of high school students who have organized themselves to lead a nationwide movement to curb gun violence.

Whether you agree or disagree with the policy prescriptions advocated by the students, there are some clear leadership lessons...

Think about the last time you made a big purchase like a car, a major appliance or a mattress. With the possible exception of the car, there’s a pretty good chance you bought the product online after reading a lot of customer reviews. Why was that the case? Of course, one reason is that Amazon and other online retailers make it easy to buy things online. Another likely reason is that you would do anything to avoid an aggressive sales pitch at the dealership or the store.

There are very few of us who like to be sold to. It feels insincere and competitive because our interests rarely align with that of the sales person. A win for you is great value for your money. Unless the incentives are thoughtfully considered, a win for the salesperson is to maximize the money you spend. Making a major purchase in this kind of scenario is usually a stress-inducing experience.

Even though most of us don’t like to be sold to, many of us regularly engage in selling our ideas or initiatives at work. And how effective is that? All too often, the answer is, “Not very.” I was recently reminded...

Earlier this year, I was talking with an executive coaching client about everything that was going on at once in his business life. The short and incomplete list included integrating an acquired company, moving his company’s headquarters to a new location, the annual planning process and addressing some significant new competitive threats. After hearing his list, I said to him that it reminded me of that list of stressful life events where you add up the scores of each event that is going on in your life to determine how much stress you’re dealing with.

That stressful life events list is called the Holmes-Rahe Stress Inventory. It was developed in 1967 by two psychiatrists (unsurprisingly named Holmes and Rahe) who analyzed the coincidence of stressful life events with the health outcomes of 5,000 of their patients. If you score more than 300 points on the inventory, the research shows you have about an 80 percent chance of a stress-induced health breakdown in the next two years.

When you read through their list of life events through the lens of 2018, you realize how much the world and society has changed since 1967. For instance, one of the...